Abstract

Performance on 19 auditory discrimination and identification tasks was measured for 340 listeners with normal hearing. Test stimuli included single tones,sequences of tones, amplitude-modulated and rippled noise, temporal gaps, speech, and environmental sounds. Principal components analysis and structural equation modeling of the data support the existence of a general auditory ability and four specific auditory abilities. The specific abilities are (1) loudness and duration (overall energy) discrimination; (2) sensitivity to temporal envelope variation; (3) identification of highly familiar sounds(speech and nonspeech); and (4) discrimination of unfamiliar simple and complex spectral and temporal patterns. Examination of Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores for a large subset of the population revealed little or no association between general or specific auditory abilities and general intellectual ability. The findings provide a basis for research to further specify the nature of the auditory abilities. Of particular interest are results suggestive of a familiar sound recognition (FSR) ability, apparently specialized for sound recognition on the basis of limited or distorted information. This FSR ability is independent of normal variation in both spectral-temporal acuity and of general intellectual ability.

This research was supported by Grant No. R01 DC00250 from the National Institute on Deafness and other Communicative Disorders. The authors would like to thank Patricia Knapp for her help in preparing the manuscript for publication. The associate editor and two reviewers also made significant contributions to this article. We are especially grateful for the constructive criticisms made by a third reviewer.